This is a bold claim and predictably, it has prompted a certain amount of scepticism. I based my predictions on the assumption that computer processing power would continue to double roughly every two years – which is what it’s been doing for the last 50 years.
But some of you said, hang on a minute, how can I be so confident that this rate of growth will continue? Surely there will come a point when we just can’t fit any more computing power onto a tiny piece of silicon? Well, maybe – but obstacles like that are just as likely to give rise to new innovations which could produce even more dramatic increases in processing power. For example, we could start designing computer chips in three dimensions rather than two. Or we could move off in a new direction altogether, based on technologies like quantum computing or nanotechnology.
Other people said they didn’t like the sound of connecting computers to their brains. But the better we get at designing user interfaces (and they’re getting better all the time), the more computers will start to feel like a natural extension of ourselves. So I don’t see that as major obstacle either.
I could give you a whole raft of similar arguments. But for me, the most persuasive evidence is all around us. We live in a materialist, consumer society. We spend huge amounts of money buying new stuff – and enormous resources go into developing new products and new technologies to satisfy that desire. If we were machines, you’d almost think we’d been programmed to behave this way. Now, the received thinking about this is that it just proves how shallow and superficial we are. But are we really saying that all the time and energy that we invest in material progress is essentially a waste of time? I think there’s something more profound behind it all, rooted in our deepest instinct – the instinct to survive. That instinct has been fine tuned over hundreds of thousands of years; it doesn’t back losers and it favours efficient strategies, not wasteful ones. It can sense that technological progress is the winning strategy that will take us on to the next step on the evolutionary ladder by the fastest, most direct route. So that’s what’s really driving the pace of technological change – and will continue to drive it whatever obstacles we meet along the way.
In the next issue, I’ll be looking at the evidence that this evolutionary leap could happen a lot sooner than the timescale of 20-50 years I’ve been talking about here [But probably not within the next month, so don’t cancel your subscriptions yet – Ed].
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